Friedman

'That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back" is a landmark in American popular literature: It is the first book by Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and mega-best-selling author of "The World Is Flat," "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" and so on, in which an alert reader can go whole paragraphs—whole pages, in a few instances—without fighting the impulse to chuck it across the room.

As a writer, Mr. Friedman is best known for his galloping assaults on Strunk and White's Rule No. 9: "Do Not Affect a Breezy Manner." "The World Is Flat" & Co. were cyclones of breeziness, mixing metaphors by the dozens and whipping up slang and clichés and jokey catchphrases of the author's own invention. (The flattened world was just the beginning.) The breeziness would accelerate into great gusts of rhetoric about "an America we could be . . . an America we once were . . . an America we can be again," as though the author were poking fun at a slightly drunk Ted Sorensen.

In "That Used to Be Us," the method has been slightly altered. It would be going too far to describe the writing as "subdued," but its relative readability marks a break with its predecessors. How to explain it? My guess is that we can thank Mr. Friedman's co-author, Michael Mandelbaum. A close friend of Mr. Friedman, he is the author of many normal, un-Friedmanlike books, including "The Meaning of Sports." ("Delightful"—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times.)

To cite one instance where we might thank Mr. Mandelbaum: When Mr. Friedman fastens onto one of his catchphrases, it customarily becomes a bludgeon with which he delivers repeated and merciless blows upon his readers. My informal count in "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" shows that Mr. Friedman used the title phrase or some variation of it nearly 40 times: an average of one appearance every 12 pages. In the new book, Mr. Mandelbaum has saved his co-author from a repetitive-stress injury and kept the use of the phrase "That Used to Be Us" down to 10 times. It may seem like a small thing to you, but you haven't read the book yet.

To be sure, I should insert a "to be sure" paragraph here. The book still bears the unmistakable stamp of the stylist who has become famous for such sentences as: "The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels." Mr. Mandelbaum's staying hand falters at times, and suddenly we are being pelted with clumps of words that Thomas L. Friedman, alone among native English speakers, could have devised.

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That Used to Be Us

By Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
(Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 380 pages, $28)

"Faced with era-defining challenges," he writes, "the country has responded with all the vigor and determination of a lollipop." One chapter is called "Homework x 2 = The American Dream." He advocates "empowering powerful breakthroughs" and notes that "the cloud . . . is driving the flattening further and faster." (Pointless alliteration + runaway metaphor = Friedmanism.) Certain phrases crop up so often that they must have been rejected book titles: "Average is over" is one of the new ones, if you want to give it a try. (You'll be hearing it on "Charlie Rose.")

Mr. Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer. He announces that "America declared war on math and physics." Three paragraphs later, we learn that we're "waging war on math and physics." Three sentences later: "We went to war against math and physics." And onto the next page: "We need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both." Three sentences later: We must "reverse the damage we have done by making war on both math and physics," because, we learn two sentences later, soon the war on terror "won't seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math." He must think we're idiots.

The slovenliness of our language, George Orwell wrote, makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and while Mr. Friedman's language has been tidied up a bit, the thinking remains what it has always been. The authors call themselves "frustrated optimists." Their frustration is owing to the depredations of the last decade, which they call (Mr. Mandelbaum nods) the Terrible Twos. But self-contradiction is also part of the Friedman brand. In many other passages, the authors specifically trace the American slide to the end of the Cold War—though still elsewhere they remark that the 1990s were "positive for America." It doesn't help their argument, such as it is, that the evidence of decline they cite—crumbling infrastructure, a failing public-education system—predates both 2001 and 1989 by a long stretch. Our potholes and schools have been favorites of declinists for generations.

If the authors' frustration is unoriginal and ill-defined, their optimism is terrifying. America will rebound—we will become the us that we used to be again, you might say and Mr. Friedman does—when we regain our ability to do "big things" through "collective action." Collective action is a phrase that means "the federal government." Among the big things that we will do are rework American industry, through regulation and taxation, to drastically cut carbon emissions. Another one of our big things is a big increase in the gasoline tax. We will also impose on us a new big carbon tax. We will use revenues to create a "clean energy" industry with millions of "green jobs" like the ones that were eliminated earlier this month at Solyndra. Readers will wonder, like the early environmentalist Tonto, "What do you mean 'we,' kemo sabe?"

Optimism about the American future is always the safest bet. It may not even matter if the optimism is expressed in slogans and jingles and requires a boundless faith in the ability of government planners to make exquisite adjustments to human behavior. Such optimism is essential to the Friedman brand, and it explains why readers return to him in book after book. You're welcome to it, but do remember to bring a lot of shovels.

Mr. Ferguson is a senior editor of the Weekly Standard and the author of "Crazy U" (Simon & Schuster).